“Our standard operating procedures and best practices are based around Loxo as opposed to trying to get our ATS to fit into our own processes. That makes everything a lot easier.” — Michael Dha, President, Strive Recruitment
When Strive Recruitment first became a Loxo customer nearly a decade ago, the firm looked very different.
There were around five people on the team, typically with just one or two recruiters covering each desk. The company operated from a 900-square-foot office and focused exclusively on permanent recruitment across accounting and finance, corporate administration, and manufacturing.
“We were happy making three to five placements each month and enjoying our Friday afternoons together,” recalls Michael Dha, President of Strive Recruitment.
But Strive was beginning to think about what the company could become.
Their existing ATS, MaxHire, had been acquired by Bullhorn. Product development had slowed, and Strive was facing an eventual transition onto Bullhorn’s core platform. Dha began exploring alternatives.
“I think I had demoed every ATS there was,” he says.
Loxo was one of the last platforms he discovered. It also made the biggest impression.
“The tech was fantastic. It was user-friendly. It had the CRM built in, which was critical for us as an agency to have everything in one place. It was progressive technology. It had automations and efficiencies that were exactly what we were looking for in terms of making our recruiters’ lives easier.”
But the technology wasn’t the only deciding factor.
Dha wanted a technology provider that would treat Strive like a partner. That became clear from his earliest interactions with Loxo, beginning when CEO Matt Chambers personally gave him his first demo.
“The follow-up calls just assured me that this was the right partner for us,” Dha says. “Look, we’re eight, nine years in and we’re still loving the product and service.”
Growing Strive without losing what made it Strive
Over the years that followed, Strive grew steadily.
The original team has grown to more than 20 people, with operations spanning Vancouver and Ontario and searches reaching across North America and beyond. Three members of that early team remain with Strive today as company leaders.
Growth brought new opportunities, but Dha was determined that it wouldn’t come at the expense of the culture Strive had built.
“Our number one core value is to build awesome relationships,” he says. “When we were growing, that was always top of mind for me, not to lose that fabric, not to lose that kind of secret sauce.”
A major inflection point came in 2022, when Dha partnered with Kim, an experienced recruitment leader with deep knowledge of the Ontario market. Strive expanded east, and the Ontario operation has since grown to roughly the same size as its Vancouver team.
At the same time, the business itself evolved. What had once been predominantly permanent contingency search is now split roughly evenly between permanent recruitment and contractor or temporary staffing.
Loxo helped give Strive the visibility it needed to manage that increasingly complex business.
“The data visibility is probably the thing that benefits the team as a whole most,” Dha says.
Regardless of office or division, Strive recruiters can see jobs, pipeline activity, candidate submissions, historical client feedback, screening notes, and other context. Leaders use Loxo analytics to monitor KPIs and progress toward targets in real time.
That visibility becomes increasingly important as the organization grows.
“It’s imperative to have real-time updates,” Dha says. “We know they’re true data, we know it’s in real time, and we know that we’re getting all the information that we need to continue making business decisions and reach our targets and reach our goals.”
Rather than asking recruiters to adapt their behavior to accommodate their technology, Strive has increasingly built its way of working around Loxo.
“Our standard operating procedures and best practices are based around Loxo as opposed to trying to get our ATS to fit into our own processes,” Dha says. “That makes everything a lot easier.”
From five placements a month to projects involving hundreds of contractors
The scale of Strive today bears little resemblance to those early years.
The company has grown from less than $1 million in revenue to more than 10X that amount. A month with seven placements once called for celebration; today, Strive averages more than 30 placements per month.
More importantly, growth has expanded the kinds of opportunities Strive is equipped to pursue.
“We’re no longer shy about applying for RFPs or taking on very big projects,” Dha says.
In 2026, Strive launched its first new division in more than a decade, expanding into technology recruitment. One of the division’s first major engagements is with a global public e-commerce company, with Strive onboarding 100 contractors over the course of a year.
Across its manufacturing and technology divisions, Strive expects to place more than 200 contractors.
“I don’t think that we would even have the appetite, or even know that when we were five of us,” Dha says. “We would have been terrified of bidding on such a project.”
Today, Strive has the team, resources, technology, and confidence to pursue them.
Its reach has expanded, too. Strive works with clients throughout Canada and the United States and is now supporting global projects. Forbes has even recognized them as one of Canada’s top recruiting and staffing companies.
“It’s nice to see Strive now entering its 18th year as more of a recognizable brand throughout Canada and even the US,” Dha says.
A partnership that evolved with the business
As Strive changed, its expectations for its technology changed with it.
For Dha, one of the reasons the relationship with Loxo has lasted is that the Talent Intelligence Platform has continued to evolve rather than remaining the product Strive originally purchased nearly a decade ago.
“The biggest part of that is the evolution of not only the tech, but the organization as a whole and all the benefits that we continue to see as new updates and things that have propelled our business forward.”
That partnership extends to support.
Dha says Strive initially had reservations about moving from traditional support toward AI-powered assistance through Artemis. Those reservations quickly disappeared.
“I think 90% of the time our queries are solved with Artemis, and that’s huge,” he says. “It’s like instant, and it’s smart.”
The experience has become so ingrained in Strive’s culture that when a new employee asks colleagues how to do something in Loxo, the answer is often simply: “Ask Artemis.”
But Dha sees Loxo’s support as broader than a help button.
“There’s always someone looking after us, we feel, when it comes to new product updates, renewals, ensuring that the way we’re using it is probably optimized the best way,” he says. “So we’ve always felt very comfortable with being serviced with Loxo.”
That relationship has continued as Strive begins exploring Loxo’s newest AI capabilities. Rather than simply receiving new technology, Dha describes Strive and its Loxo account team as working together to determine how new agents can best fit into Strive’s workflow.
“We’re still identifying the best practices, and I think we’re working together,” he says. “Again, very cool, right? Your account manager’s making sure that we’re utilizing all the power that these agents can provide.”
Buying back the one thing great recruiters need most: time
For Strive, the next phase of growth isn’t simply about hiring more people.
Dha sees AI changing what company size and scale will mean over the next several years. Headcount alone may become a much less meaningful measure of a recruitment firm’s capacity.
Instead, Strive wants to make its existing recruiters increasingly effective by removing the administrative work and bottlenecks surrounding the parts of recruiting that require human expertise.
“Their days in a perfect world, they wanna be just filled with meetings,” Dha says. “That’s their goal.”
Recruiters will still be essential to intake, candidate relationships, interviews, client conversations, and offer negotiations. But Dha sees an opportunity for AI and automation to accelerate the work around those interactions, from sourcing and intake through submissions and scheduling.
The business impact is significant. Labor is one of an agency’s largest expenses. If Strive can give its best recruiters more capacity, it can take on more work without assuming every increase in business requires a corresponding increase in headcount.
“We’ve got some superstar recruiters here, and the only thing that we can’t buy them is time,” Dha says. “Which is now going to change with Loxo’s new AI agents.”
That idea is increasingly shaping how Dha thinks about Strive’s future.
“I used to put a lot of our goals around headcount, because that was always the key kind of indicator of how big you were,” he says. “But the way I look at it, in the next three to five years, headcount is gonna be a nominal and probably an insignificant indicator of the size of company you are and the reach that you have.”
Instead, Strive plans to keep growing by winning larger clients, serving existing ones exceptionally well, and continuously improving the efficiency of the business behind the scenes.
And after nearly a decade together, Dha still sees Loxo as part of that journey.
“We’re happy to be partners,” he says. “The fact that there’s always something new coming down the pipeline, the horizon... we get really excited when there’s something that aligns with our business extremely well.”
For Dha, that relationship has grown close enough that the line occasionally blurs.
When describing Loxo building more functionality natively into the platform, he catches himself referring to Loxo as “we.” “See, I feel like I’m a part of your company, right?”
For a partnership that began when Strive had five people and was only starting to imagine what the company might someday become, perhaps that says it best.
